Myth-Making and the Historical Imagination: an Investigation of the Historiography of Islamic Iberia Through Castilian Literature

Myth-making and the Historical Imagination: An Investigation of the Historiography of Islamic Iberia Through Castilian Literature Gaston Jean-Xavier Arze Springfield, Virginia BA English, University of Virginia, 2017 A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of Religious Studies University of Virginia December, 2018 Dr. Ahmed H. al-Rahim Dr. E. Michael Gerli 2 1. Introduction A historical narrative is thus necessarily a mixture of adequately and inadequately explained events, a congeries of established and inferred facts, at once a representation that is an interpretation and an interpretation that passes for an explanation of the whole process mirrored in the narrative. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (1978). The history of Islam in Spain is a deeply contested historical narrative, whose interpretation has significant implications for Spain’s perception of its national identity, as well as its historical memory, and modern political discourse. The rejection of Islamic Iberia plays an important role in the modern understanding of the nascence of the Spanish state. This is because, the history of medieval Iberia is largely framed as an 800-year struggle for independence from invading Muslims. This historical narrative is obviously at odds with the historical presence of the religion of Islam, the irrefutable linguistic contact between Arabic and Peninsular Romance, and the role of Arabic and Arabic sources in Iberia’s rich literary history. The aforementioned interpretation of the history of the Iberian Peninsula also rejects the influence that Islam played in the creation of identities unique to the peninsula: namely, the Mudéjars, the Moriscos and the Mozarabs. That being said, this paper will not be concerned with proving the extent of shared cultural contact between the peninsular Abrahamic traditions. Instead, the express goal of this thesis will be to identify the markers of the rigid Spanish national identity, and the motivations for the exclusion of Islamic Spain from 20th and 21st century conceptions of the Spanish historical memory. This will be accomplished by identifying, in the medieval Iberian literary tradition, the ideological predecessors of 20th century philologists, with an emphasis on the work of Ramón Menéndez 3 Pidal. Finally, the reemergence of these questions in modern political discourses will also be considered. This history of present-day Spain is essentially the history of a “religious sensibility”, as well as the “grandeur, the misery, and the paralysis” that resulted from it1. From this idea, a singular historical narrative has arisen. This dominant narrative is an ideologically Catholic narrative, forged from the imperial and material successes of the Castilian crown. In reality, there is little besides the imperial grip of the Kingdom of Castile which has ever united the entirety of the what we now call Spain. However, the creation of a homogenous Catholic identity has long been, and continues to be, a priority of the Castilian ruling class, and this is made apparent in both the historiographic and literary traditions of Castile. This sentiment is present in Alfonso X’s historiographical work of the Spanish people, the General Estoria, and the mythologized genesis of Catholic Spain presented in it has not fully faded from the national identity ever since. This historical memory of the Spanish people has long been characterized by what Americo Castro calls “the myth of a universal empire sustained by the Catholic faith” (8)2. This is part of a carefully constructed interpretation, or schema, which until quite recently has been left largely unchallenged. Respected Spanish philologists, such Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and Ramón Menéndez Pidal, have worked to affirm the orthodox Castilian historiography of the Iberian Peninsula by effectively separating ‘Islamic’ and ‘Christian Spain’ into discrete objects of history. Whereas other, more contemporary, scholars such as Brian Catlos have argued that human histories have shown themselves to be “too complex to be reduced to living caricatures of their religious identities” and that conflicts on the 1 Castro, Américo. The Structure of Spanish History, trans. Edmund King (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 121 2 Ibid. 4 Iberian Peninsula were waged more often within faith communities than between them3. This unfortunate truth, however, does not make for as compelling of a basis for a national mythos as does an ideological war against a monolithic enemy. It is from this myth that the ideology of what is presently known as the ‘Reconquista’ shifted from one of the reclamation of formerly Christian lands, to one of domination and subjugation over Islam. The term ‘Reconquista’ itself is a product of this process, and requires much investigation, however, it is necessary that we return to these questions within the context of the litereary and historiographical works which will be discussed later. This mythologized historiography will be the primary concern of that section of this essay, but special attention will be paid to the ways in which it has been distorted for power and political gain. The present-day Kingdom of Spain, perhaps more so than most other European nations, locates its historical memory within a confluence of opposing historical interpretations. There are those who seek to exalt the Reconquista, while simultaneously rejecting al-Andalus4. This interpretation is most closely associated with the Conservatives in Spanish politics, who rely on Menéndez Pidal’s essentialized depiction of Islamic Iberia. There are also those who seek to romantically re-characterize Islamic Spain as a land of tolerance, which should be celebrated, and serve as a model for today’s society. Naturally, this position is held by many center and left- leaning individuals. This ideology gained popularity more recently than, and largely in response to, the former5. Neither interpretation is entirely faithful to the reality of everyday life within a member state of the medieval Mediterranean milieu. And so, this paper does not seek to explicitly support either of these positions, as they are both rooted in a contentious nationalist 3 Catlos, Brian A. Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 4-5. 4 García-Sanjuán, Alejandro. Rejecting al-Andalus, exalting the Reconquista: historical memory in contemporary Spain. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 10:1, 2018. 5 Ibid., 127-8. 5 historiography—a historiography that has been semi-mythologized through its acceptance of prejudice, myth, and anachronism. However, these ideologies still linger within Spanish academia and politics, and this paper is concerned with identifying links between medieval Castilian texts which attempted to draw direct links, real or imagined, between the Christian crowns and their preferred antecedents: the Visigothic kingdoms and the Western Roman Empire. As this was fundamental in the process of creating a historical narrative that could justifiably exclude al-Andalus, and its Islamized history, from the overwhelmingly Catholic Castilian Spanish identity that emerged. This conflict is part of a larger one which has characterized the development of the academic fields of historiography, in general, and Spanish Arabism specifically. That conflict is one of historical authority— over which group “claim the right to determine of what a ‘realistic’ representation of social reality might consist of”6. One of the main objectives of this paper is to investigate the origins of modern conceptions of what it means to be Spanish. It does not seek to answer this question, but rather to understand how the answer to question has developed over time. We often conceive of histories as being uninterrupted and congruous through time, from pre- history to the contemporary. But this is simply not so. It leads us to believe that “everything that happened on the soil now called Spain is Spanish, as that everything that existed on the soil of ancient Italy is Italian”7 But this assumption is logically inoperative. Are we to believe that the cave paintings of Altamira belong to the same Hispanic identity as did St. Isidore of Seville? And what of Cervantes, who belonged to an entirely different Hispanic world than St. Isidore? 6 White, Hayden. “Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. p. 46 7 Castro, Américo. The Spaniards: An Introduction to their History, trans. Willard F. King and Selma Margaretten (Berkley: University of California Press, 1971) 31. 6 Or ibn Rushd for that matter? These may seem like trivial distinctions, but it is only through this investigation of semantics that we can produce the limits of its use. This problem is difficult to answer definitively, but we can approach an answer through the study, and use, of philology. 2. Alfonso X el Sabio’s General Estoria and Estoria de España The second section of this essay is focused on historical, ideological, and literary foundations of the Castilian national historiography. First, it will provide the necessary historical background for understanding the imperial aspiration of Alfonso X of Castile (d. 1284) both within, and beyond, the Iberian Peninsula. Then, it will track, the transmission, and development of the national mythos from its Visigothic foundations up to the reign of Alfonso X. Alfonso’s influence on the historiography of Spain

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